We’re sharing this article. it’s written by Hadrien ROCHE, 6-12 year old trainer at the ISMM.
Freedom and constraints
Freedom is one of the most important and misunderstood concepts of Montessori pedagogy.
For most of us, our school memories are not associated with the idea of freedom. The most common educational method is based above all on constraint: we must be seated, motionless, silent. The activity is chosen by the teacher and must be carried out in strictly defined parameters.
This constraint is most often found in our professional life. Whether you are self-employed and had to respond to the requests of a client or employee and obey the injunctions of a superior, the world of work is rarely based on freedom.
Holidays, whether you are a child or an adult, are particularly cherished for the freedom that is precisely regained: the absence of constraints, the rediscovered choice of activities to do or not to do…
The idea of basing an educational system on freedom therefore often causes a doubtful eyebrow raised as it seems to be a counterpoint to the experience lived by the majority.
However, it is consistent with Maria Montessori’s idea of based her method not on a transformation of an existing educational model, but on respect for the laws of human development.
For most of its history, and for some peoples on Earth even today, humans were a hunter-gatherer.
He devoted part of his day to gleaning fruits, roots and stems, collecting insects and shells and occasionally hunting animal prey. Another part of his time was dedicated to the manufacture of tools and the maintenance of existing ones.
When anthropologists observe the tribes who still live in this way today, they observe that this working time imposed by vital needs does not take a lot of time (according to estimates, all the household chores added together arrive at about forty hours per week). These peoples, as well as our ancestors, had a lot of leisure time. And even within the working time necessary for survival, they had a great deal of autonomy on how to meet these objectives. Whether it was gleaning, gathering or hunting, these tasks required creativity, observation, and a little adventure.
Children in these tribes join adults when they can and learn by doing, enjoying the same level of freedom.
Sedentary life, agriculture, urbanization and then the specialization of work and industrialization will gradually increase the technological level of human groups, bring them a certain security and material abundance, at the cost of a loss of autonomy and freedom. In the industrial urban society of the 21st century, the level of complexity of the system is such that everyone must play a specific role.
Yet, even within our complex and constrained society, experiences show that humans keep a great need for autonomy.
Turning humans into machines that constantly repeat the same gesture without thinking is harmful to mental health. In the long term, it is even bad for productivity since repetition lowers attention and will cause errors.
The school as we know it today was born in the industrial era and takes up the codes of the assembly line, and the same level of constraint required of the first workers was transferred to the children.
Maria Montessori therefore approaches the idea of freedom in her educational method as a return to this human nature whose potential she seeks to realize. Where humans shape, machine and transform resources to reveal their full power, they will need to take a step back when it comes to education. Humans, unlike things, have a subjectivity, an agency. They need to be recognized as individuals, and granted a share of freedom to be able to express what makes them unique, to find all the resources within themselves.
Indeed, we can well imagine the need for strong constraints when it will be necessary to manufacture the safety valves of a nuclear power plant, or to carry out an open heart operation. There is a specific goal to achieve, and it is both essential and easy to determine the parameters of success. But in terms of education? Who can define the objective to be achieved in terms of encrypted parameters? No one knows what this child will become, what role he will have to play in the world and what it is important to prepare him for.
This obviously does not prevent some people from trying to narrowly define the criteria for a successful education. At one end of the spectrum, all authoritarian regimes indoctrinate children, try to shape them, to fiercely prune the tree of possibilities to ensure that these children become nothing more than what the totalitarian state desires.
Even in liberal democratic societies (in the sense of: based on individual freedom), all attempts to get children into very narrow boxes have totalitarian snants. There is always a tension in public debates on education between the desire to “prepare children for the labor market” and the idea that the school should develop transversal capacities. One can indeed wonder whether education is intended to prepare children for coercion or freedom.
In general, it is remarkable that the question of the definition of the success of education, and therefore deeply, of its purpose, remains elusive. To quote Phillipe Perrenoud, “it is when we impose a fiction of homogeneity that we transform individual differences into success and failure. “If success is measured in grades out of twenty obtained during an exam, then some children may be “fail”, and it may be necessary to impose constraints on them to allow them to cross this very specific bar. But such criteria are extremely arbitrary, responding to a specific moment in history and culture.
If, like Maria Montessori, the criteria of educational success are defined differently, such as the full development of the individual, the fulfillment of his potential at the cognitive, social, emotional, psychological and physical level, then two ideas emerge.
The first is that the success or failure of such a “program” is not to be found in children. The child is biologically programmed to become the best version of himself, and it is up to us adults to provide him with the best conditions for this. No child can fail to become who he is. We, adults, can fail to offer him the living conditions, the experiences that will allow him to do it optimally.
The second is that such success can only be achieved by freedom and not by constraint. It is only through the use of his freedom that the child will be able to explore and discover this path that is his. No one but him can go through it in his place. No one else knows him. He himself is not aware of it. He will need to explore, to search to find him. There will therefore be tests, dead ends, backtracking. Such a process is not a straight line where constraints would allow us to stay the course and go as fast as possible, but a slow discovery where only freedom allows us to take the time and detours necessary to achieve the real goal.
Traditional, transmissive education is too often a coercive education, which aims to train children in a motionless, solitary and silent concentration. Children who develop the ability to carry out long studies are children who are, at least, able to accept, endure, the constraints imposed by the educational system.
Montessori education must teach freedom. The freedom given to the child is not an abandonment of his natural impulses. It is a long and demanding job, which will be based on the development of the child’s will, his moral sense, his social abilities.
It is because it is essential to the development of the child that freedom must be carefully considered, and its control accompanied throughout the child’s education. It is on the adapted implementation of a freedom corresponding to the child’s abilities, within a prepared environment that the success of Montessori pedagogy rests.
As Maria Montessori says in the formation of man:
“We can say with certainty, after more than forty years of experience, and from repeated evidence obtained among all races all over the world that spontaneous discipline was the basis on which all other amazing results were based, such as the explosion of writing and all these forms of progress, which became evident later”
Course: ISMM
